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Unruly Teenagers and the Drug War |
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Following up on Lance’s pro-legalization piece, here’s something interesting from the Reddit comment thread:
Mekongcola: I just want to point out about 100years ago all of these substances were legal and we did just fine then. There is no reason they should be outlawed now…
neat stuff: One thing has changed. Teens probably have much greater disposable income at a point in their lives where they have much less personal responsibility. Back in the day, people were married with kids at a time where today they would just be finishing high school and getting ready to party in college.
That’s not an argument against legalization. But it would be interesting to see what kind of impact that would have on drug use if it were legalized today.
I think these are great and important points. I agree with the first redditor, but I also agree with the second.
It’s not a direct connection, but this discussion reminds me that proponents of outlawing marijuana in the 1930s often referred to “uppity negroes” as one problem that marijuana caused. As these two redditors imply, outlawing drugs has often been used as a way to control groups seen as deviant - black people testing the limits of segregation in the 1930s, white teenagers testing the limits of cultural acceptability in the 1960s (LSD was legal in California until the mid-1960s, let’s remember). Did the state permit drug use so long as it felt most drug users were white men who would not tamper with the social fabric?
And it’s interesting that the continuation of the drug war is always justified by how drugs will affect your teenager, as we’ve seen in so many ads, the DARE program etc.
